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Article published In:
Linguistics in the Netherlands 2017
Edited by Sander Lestrade and Bert Le Bruyn
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 34] 2017
► pp. 17–29

The change of Frisian infinitives

| Utrecht University

This paper discusses the two types of infinitives in Frisian: infinitives ending in -E (e.g. rinne “walk”) and infinitives ending in -EN (e.g. rinnen “walk”). It shows that their distribution can be accounted for by their different underlying syntactic structure: the -E infinitive has a fully verbal structure whereas the -EN infinitive has a flexible structure which always involves a DP. Moreover, I argue that the fact that the difference between the two forms is disappearing can be explained both by Dutch influence and by the fact that the structure of the infinitives already showed much overlap.

Keywords: infinitives, nominal and verbal structure, language change, Dutch-Frisian language contact
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The data
    • 2.1Traditional distribution
    • 2.2Recent data
      • 2.2.1Method
      • 2.2.2Results
  • 3.Analysis
    • 3.1The structure of the infinitives
      • 3.1.1The -E infinitive
      • 3.1.2The -EN infinitive
    • 3.2Language change
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

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Published online: 23 November 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.34.02ber
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